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Home > Catholic Encyclopedia > C > Tommaso Campanella


TOMMASO CAMPANELLA

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(Baptized GIOVANNI DOMENICO)

Dominican philosopher and writer, b. 5 Sept. 1568 at Stilo in the province of
Calabria, Italy; d. at Paris, 21 May, 1639. He was a facile writer of prose and
verse at the age of thirteen, and when not yet fifteen entered the Dominican
Order, attracted by the fame of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. With a
predilection for philosophical inquiry, he was sent to different convents to
hear the best masters. Campanella wrote his first work, "Philosophia sensibus
demonstrata" (Naples, 1590) in defence of the naturalistic philosopher
Bernardino Telesio. He next went to Rome and afterwards to the University of
Padua, from Oct., 1592, to the end of 1594. An ardent and somewhat captious
temperament led him into the expression of views offensive to many of the older
and newer schools alike. He was especially vigorous in his opposition to the
authority of Aristotle, and was cited before the Holy Office at Rome, where he
was detained till 1597. Some accounts speak of his having been accused of magic
and of his fleeing to Florence, Venice, Padua, and Bologna, thence back to
Naples and Stilo. Continuing to lecture and write, however, he retained favour
in certain circles. At length, in Sept., 1599, he was seized as head of a
conspiracy against the Spanish rule. In the trial at Naples, involving many
persons, lay and ecclesiastical, he was charged with divers heresies and with
aiming to set up a communistic commonwealth. Arraigned before an ecclesiastical
tribunal, he was at the same time harassed and put to torture by a political
court. On 8 Jan., 1603, he was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Among
several who sought to obtain his liberation was Pope Paul V. In the meantime the
viceroy, Giron, who used to visit Campanella in prison, seeking his counsel
about matters of state, became involved in trouble. In his endeavours to
extricate himself he laid the blame largely on Campanella, who was again
subjected to many indignities. Through Pope Urban VIII, who applied directly to
Philip IV of Spain, the unfortunate prisoner was at last released from his
Neapolitan captivity, 15 May, 1626, an event which was commemorated by Gabriel
Naude in his "Panegyricus" (Paris, 1644). He was taken to Rome and held for a
time by the Holy Office, but was restored to full liberty, 6 April, 1629. In
1634 another Calabrian conspiracy under one of Campanella's followers threatened
fresh complications. With the aid of Cardinal Barberini and the French
ambassador, De Noailles, Campanella, disguised as a Minim, withdrew to France.
Louis XIII and Richelieu received him with marked favour, the latter granting
him a liberal pension. He spent the rest of his days, enjoying papal favour, in
the Dominican convent of St-Honore at Paris.



Of the life and character of Campanella, conflicting estimates are given. He was
well thought of by Popes Clement VIII, Paul V, and Urban VIII. Cardinal
Pallavicini* declared him a "man who had read all things and who remembered all
things; of mighty but indomitable character." In faith and theological
allegiance he was held above suspicion by Juan De Lugo, afterwards cardinal;
Theophile Raynaud considered him heretical. Vincent Baron, O.P., who knew him
well, gave a careful eulogy of him as skilled in mathematics, astrology,
medicine, and other sciences; more famous, perhaps, than he deserved to be, but
still a man of extraordinary gifts. John Addington Symonds, who translated a
book of his sonnets (Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarotti and Tommaso
Campanella, London, 1878), refers to him as the "audacious Titan of the modern
age, possessing essentially a combative intellect; a poet and philosopher
militant, who stood alone making war upon the authority of Aristotle in science,
of Machiavelli in statecraft, and of Petrarch in art". His nunquam tacebo is
evidenced in almost every act and utterance of his strange career. Campanella's
work is critical and composite rather than constructive and original. It
exhibits an almost encyclopedic acquaintance with all the known sciences of his
day. His doctrine does not form a system, but discloses a syncretic adaptation
of certain fundamental principles of St. Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great,
modified by original opinions and fused with ideas, often unsound and bizarre,
borrowed from Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Empedocles, the Christian
mystics, and the Jewish and Arabic schools of thought. He aimed to reconstruct
scholastic philosophy, but, lacking grasp and depth, his judgment was often
obscured by an untempered imagination, and his writings, of widest scope, abound
in the inequalities of undisciplined genius. With the fondness of the
Renaissance for disputation and innovation, he was also singularly swayed by the
popular pseudo-science of judicial astrology. Unlike Bruno, however, he remained
loyal to his order and to the Church. In his theologico-cosmological theory,
being, both created and Divine, is invested with three primordial properties:
power, wisdom, and love. Non-being is characterized by impotence, darkness, and
odium or metaphysical aversion. In God, Who is pure being, simple and infinite,
the three properties of being exist and subsist in simplest unity to the
absolute exclusion of non-being and its attributes. Creatures participate in
God's wisdom, power, and love; but, because derived from nothingness, their
essence is a mixture of being and non-being. The Divine, impressed upon,
immanent in, and shared by, finite natures, is the principle, the sufficient
reason, and the measure of their relative perfection and of their development in
time and space. The universe is vivified, directed, and governed by a universal
soul of sense and intelligence. The world is as a living statue of God. The sun
and the earth are its principal parts and the common source of animal life and
movement, and of the sensation which is also found in all material things,
light, air, metals, and wood. Prior to Descartes, to whom he was otherwise
superior in erudition, Campanella demonstrated the absurdity of scepticism and
undertook to establish by psychologico-ontological argument the existence of God
against Atheism. In the field of natural science Campanella preceded Bacon in
insisting on the direct observation and experimental study of nature. It is
noteworthy that whilst Bacon rejected the astronomical theory of Galileo,
Campanella favoured it, and wrote a brilliant defence of its author. In his
treatise, "De Monarchia Hispanica" ["A Discourse touching the Spanish Monarchy",
tr. by Edmund Chilmead (London, 1654) and again by Wm. Prynne (ibid., 1660)],
Campanella evinces, among ideas singularly strange and erroneous, considerable
practical knowledge of civil government. To extend Spanish rule in Europe he
advised intermarriage of the Spaniards with other nationalities, urged the
establishment of schools of astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, etc., and the
immediate opening of naval colleges to develop the resources of the New World
and further the interests of its inhabitants. In general he advocated natural
honesty and justice and the universal love of god and man in place of the
utilitarian principles and egoism of Machiavelli.



Because of its political character, his "Civitas Solis" (City of the Sun), is
the most celebrated of his works. It appears in "Ideal Commonwealths" (New York,
1901) and in "Ideal Empires and Republics" (Washington and London, 1901). It was
probably intended by Campanella as a philosophical fiction, like Plato's
"Republic" and More's "Utopia", for its essentially communistic delineation, and
advocacy, of goods, education, women, labour, and all necessaries in common
could hardly represent the true mind of an author who, after all, was faithful
to at least the spirit of Christianity, and who vehemently resisted the
rationalistic trend of his contemporaries. Various lists, some furnished by
Campanella himself, show him to have been the author of about eighty-eight
works. The more important are: "Prodromus Philosophiae instaurandae" (Frankfort,
1617); "Philosophiae rationalis partes quinque" (Paris, 1638); "Realis
philosophiae epilogisticae partes quatour" (which contains the "Civitas Solis",
Frankfort, 1623); "Medicinalium juxta propria principia libri VII" (Lyons,
1635); "Astrologicorum libri VI" (Lyons, 1629); "Apologia pro Galileo
mathematico" (Frankfort, 1622); "Atheismus triumphatus" (Rome, 1631); "De
praedestinatione, electione, reprobatione et auxiliis divinae gratiae, cento
thomisticus" (Paris, 1636). Numerous unpublished manuscripts are preserved in
the archives of the Dominican Order at Rome.




ABOUT THIS PAGE

APA citation. Volz, J. (1908). Tommaso Campanella. In The Catholic Encyclopedia.
New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03221b.htm

MLA citation. Volz, John. "Tommaso Campanella." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol.
3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908.
<http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03221b.htm>.

Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Gerald M. Knight.

Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. November 1, 1908. Remy Lafort, S.T.D.,
Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.

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